This invention relates generally to gaming printers and more specifically to gaming printers with print verification features.
The gaming machine manufacturing industry provides a variety of gaming machines for the amusement of gaming machine players. An exemplary gaming machine is a slot machine. A slot machine is an electro-mechanical game wherein chance or the skill of a player determines the outcome of the game. Slot machines are usually found in casinos or other more informal gaming establishments.
Gaming machine manufacturers have introduced the use of a gaming printer allowing the printing of a voucher for a player's winnings when the player cashes out. The gaming printer may be resident in a slot machine or made available to a bank of slot machines via a gaming system. The voucher can either be redeemed with a cashier or redeemed by inserting the voucher into the same or another slot machine for playing credit, as if the voucher were money. The gaming printer's role, therefore, is to print out winnings thereby avoiding the need for the slot machine to dispense coins with each pay-out or jackpot won.
Gaming printers may be implemented using dot impact printers and thermal printers. Dot impact printers, also known as impact printers, are printers that make an image by striking an inked ribbon overlaid on plain paper with a small pin that hammers the ink onto the paper to make a small dot. Impact printers, by their electro-mechanical nature, have a number of moving parts and make a characteristic grinding sound, such as the noise made by all older receipt printers. A thermal printers is a printer where paper with a heat sensitive side is imaged using a print head which applies heat in tiny dots (typically 1/200 th of an inch in size) in order to turn an area black. In this manner, all images are created by a series of tiny black dots. A widely known example of a thermal printer is the original fax machine.
The gaming printer may be controlled by a Gaming Machine Interface Board (GMIB) such as a slot machine interface board which is a controller board for a game resident within the chassis of the game. The gaming printer may be controlled by commands sent from a host controller board such as a GMIB, or another host controller board upstream of the slot machine in order to print vouchers.
Anytime there an electro-mechanical device such as a gaming printer, there is a chance of an equipment failure that leaves the desired printing operation unaccomplished. For a thermal printer used as a gaming printer, such a failure can occur for a number of reasons: (i) the printer experiences a hardware failure; (ii) a residue or heat transfer failing which prevents a proper image from developing on the thermal paper ticket; or (iii) a failure in the paper coating process at the factory so that there is a drop out on the printed image.
Any of the above failures may prevent the ticket from printing completely. Since a voucher, sometimes with a value of $1,000 or more is being dispensed (as opposed to real currency), it is very important that the voucher delivery and redemption process is highly reliable to allay a player's fear about the handling of their “money”. After a voucher is printed, the voucher can be redeemed with a cashier or the voucher can be redeemed through a slot machine's bill acceptor. A bill acceptor is a device which automatically accepts paper currency by scanning the paper currency and saving the paper currency within the slot machine. A coin change machine usually has such a device on it, and more recently, so do most slot machines. The standard vouchers for this application usually bear a barcode down the center of the voucher so that the voucher can be read automatically by the bill acceptor.
In order for the bill acceptor to properly scan the ticket, there must not be an error in the printing of the barcode, or the process will fail. Any of the previously itemized printing failures may cause the barcode to contain an error. Should such an error occur, the ticket cannot be redeemed, requiring significant casino resources to validate and hand pay the player (who at this point is probably quite nervous and has lost some of the thrill of the act of winning). A hardware failure of the printer may be detected by the communications with the GMIB, and thus an attendant may be alerted ahead of the pay out. However, previously described failure modes (ii) and (iii) are modes which may prevent the printing of a full image on the ticket and may not be detected by the GMIB or the printer. An undetected error may leave an operator of a slot machine to believe that a complete and proper pay out has been made.
Previous attempts of verification have focused on the verification of the cashout value. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,832 issued to Saunders, et al. entitled “CASHLESS PERIPHERAL DEVICE FOR A GAMING SYSTEM” discloses a method of verifying a cashout value encoded in a barcode. In the method, The cashout value is read immediately after the voucher is printed and the voucher is withheld if a printing error is detected. However, only verifying a cashout value does not fully address the verification needs of a casino. In a casino, when a player wishes to cashout with a cashier, the cashier hand enters a validation character string printed on the voucher into a terminal for verification. When a gaming machine management system verifies the entered validation character string, the voucher is paid.
Therefore, a need exists for verification of the printing of a validation character string on a voucher.